Obama’s ‘Secret Weapon’: 1 Million Campaign Contacts

President Obama has already enlisted more than 1 million donors for his 2012 re-election campaign. Now, his team is celebrating more than 1 million one-on-one conversations between Obama volunteers and prospective voters.

Campaign manager Jim Messina calls the grassroots outreach Obama’s “secret weapon” in a new video message posted on the Obama for America website. View it here.

“We’re a people campaign, based on person-to-person contact, talking about the president,” he says.

Messina, who is known as a metrics guru, cites a slew of campaign data to back up the claim that not one of the Republican candidates has or will come close to matching Obama’s nationwide ground game.

He says at least 97,230 person-to-person conversations have happened in Florida, 83,959 in North Carolina and 74,170 in Nevada – three key battleground states where aides expect field organizing, particularly in minority communities, may make the difference.

Last week, organizers held more than 2,000 events around the country to coincide with the one-year-out mark.

The 1,000 th neighborhood “team leader” officially registered with Obama for America in the past few days, Messina said.

”Our opponents can’t match this kind of campaign for two reasons: One, they simply lack the broad base of grassroots support that we have. Two, they don’t believe in it. They don’t have any interest in the kind of politics that bring everyday people together to make real change in this country,” Messina says.

”The Republican National Committee actually brags about the fact that they’re distributing their resources to focus less on low-dollar fundraising and more on high-dollar donors. They follow the dollars, we follow the energy. And that energy has always come from our grassroots supporters. That’s how we won so big in last week’s state and local elections, and that’s exactly how we’re going to win in 2012.”

In an email, RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski refuted Messina’s claims, noting that the Obama campaign and Democrats have collected more than $55 million, or 35 percent, of their 2012 campaign funds from an exclusive list of well-connected bundlers and deep-pocket donors.

“Note to Team Obama: The energy in America lies with the 62 percent of the country that disapproves of Obama’s handling of jobs and the economy,” Kukowski said. “Obama’s policies have taken us in the wrong direction, and he continues to deceive voters by saying he’s one of them while he gives donors special access and taxpayer-funded loans and his bundlers collect millions from Wall Street bankers and lobbyists.”

None of the Republican candidates have agreed to voluntarily disclose the names and contribution amounts of their top campaign financiers.